Laura Elizabeth Woollett > Quotes

“I would let myself be taken until I was nothing more than his creation, a poetic body, the divine alternative to womankind.”
― Laura Elizabeth Woollett, The Wood of Suicides

“I want you. There was a time when I may have been able to express the sentiment less crudely, yet it is too late now. I no longer understand how to quiver modestly, how to hide sweet, delicate blushes. Now I am wracked with convulsions, burned by the fires of hell. If I am a virgin, it is only in the most trivial, membranous sense of the word. Please, make my damnation official. I ask only that you rid me of this technicality.”
― Laura Elizabeth Woollett, The Wood of Suicides

“As long as I was tortured by love for him, I wanted him to be just as miserable as I was.”
― Laura Elizabeth Woollett, The Wood of Suicides

“There's no right or wrong way to grieve,' Agnes said”
― Laura Elizabeth Woollett, The Newcomer

“I watch the willows weep and cannot breathe.”
― Laura Elizabeth Woollett, The Wood of Suicides

“...it was like learning to like a new kind of music by listening to the notes that weren't played, finding warmth and relief in the hollows, the vales between the mountains of dissonance.”
― Laura Elizabeth Woollett, The Wood of Suicides

“I was aware that he couldn’t be trusted; that the classroom behind him was empty and would be empty for some time; that he was only a matter of heartbeats, a tug of my elbow, and a few whispered words away from pulling me into that room with him.”
― Laura Elizabeth Woollett, The Wood of Suicides

“...there will be nights when they can't deal with all the space around them, the time passing, the schizophrenic burr of Father's voice in their brains. Nights in the years to come, when their stories are no longer theirs, and they can barely hear each other over the screaming headlines. Nights after everything's gone to shit and their dreams are decaying bodies in a distant place. Nights when their voices are the only thing to remind each other that the good things, love, beauty, family, still exist; that the night, endless as it seems, cannot undo their progress.”
― Laura Elizabeth Woollett, Beautiful Revolutionary

“Cynical, self-deprecating, affected, indiscriminate, patronizing, immature, as sloppy intellectually as he was with his desk, fickle, vain, virile, brooding, pedantic, philandering...in short, Byronic, Byronic, Byronic, almost to the point of parody.”
― Laura Elizabeth Woollett, The Wood of Suicides

“The fallacy of conception: two halves join and expect to make a whole.”
― Laura Elizabeth Woollett, The Wood of Suicides

“There was a time of day, just before sunset, when things could go one way or another. When the whole world looked like a diorama, the sky a slow-moving painting, and sometimes she felt lucky to be exactly where she was, smoking on her porch, and other times she wanted to take the washing line and knot it around her neck”
― Laura Elizabeth Woollett, The Newcomer

“Just two men. Born in different years and different towns, but close enough to maybe hear the same trains, to watch the same clouds, to smell the same storms hitting dirt, to come together like magnets.”
― Laura Elizabeth Woollett

“It’s probably from being cooped up with your books all week. All this stale air—it’s not healthy. And your father’s study is the worst. I don’t know how you can stand sitting in that room day after day . . .”

I didn’t bother telling her that sitting in that room was easy for me. She wouldn’t have understood that what was hardest for me was the simple fact of changing, of enduring change.”
― Laura Elizabeth Woollett, The Wood of Suicides

“He'll die before me, she didn't say, but thought. I'll die alone, yet”
― Laura Elizabeth Woollett, The Newcomer

“The trouble is, she was born at the wrong time. Too late for the ballroom love of the films she grew up with and too early to swallow all the flower-child stuff. The world has a way of making her feel too young and too old at once, both impossibly naive and impossibly cynical.”
― Laura Elizabeth Woollett

“Life's boring. Gotta make some noise or the void will swallow me”
― Laura Elizabeth Woollett, The Newcomer

“god and man had been inseparable. I had come to see, however, that, in the long run, they were incompatible, just as divinity and womanhood were incompatible, or art and life. I loved him, in those last weeks, with a love that knew its own perishability, a love that threw up its arms and rejoiced in the leaf-shadings, the all-pervading odor of dark earth and chlorine.”
― Laura Elizabeth Woollett, The Wood of Suicides

“Like jumping off a skyscraper in a dream and waking to floorboards, bruises. Like drinking something sweet then going into convulsions five minutes later. Like being dropped in the middle of a jungle with a gun and orders to kill. Some things are real before they happen.”
― Laura Elizabeth Woollett, Beautiful Revolutionary

“It was school pick-up hour. She had to pass the school to get from Fergal's to Rabbit's, and the little kids just reminded her. Reminded her of things she hadn't known she wanted, like chatter in the back seat, and cutting the crusts off sandwiches, and helping with homework, and most of all being a different kind of woman; the kind who wasn't pissed on glovebox vodka at three in the arvo. And then it hit her: she was really pissed”
― Laura Elizabeth Woollett, The Newcomer

“Men are shit. She has known this since Percy, who took her virginity on the sand dunes at Santa Cruz but never called her back for a third date. Since Jean-Claude, who let her fly from the country she loved and back to the one she hated, without ever thinking to follow. Since Lenny Lynden, who accepted Terra as her replacement as easily as pancakes instead of French toast. For as long as she has been a woman, Evelyn has understood the fundamental indifference of men.”
― Laura Elizabeth Woollett, Beautiful Revolutionary

“Lenny's head pounds, in time with the truck's jolts, the women's mouths, the metallic hard-on. The shouts of hate, which he knows in his immortal dove soul are really love, love, love.”
― Laura Elizabeth Woollett, Beautiful Revolutionary

“The night is big and dirty and my legs too short to carry me far, but it’s the least I can do to make him chase after me.”
― Laura Elizabeth Woollett, The Love of a Bad Man

“She sees it coming. Like a rushing train. Like tear gas in a crowd. In the eternal seconds before it happens, she's hearing the whistle, seeing the hand reach for the grenade, and she can't stop it happening. Everything in her holds itself sharp and tense in expectation of catastrophe; everything is steel tracks, stinging eyes, bone waiting to be compressed. It's happening and she can't stop it happening; Evelyn by her knowledge tree and that moment of radical innocence before the lightning strikes.”
― Laura Elizabeth Woollett, Beautiful Revolutionary

“They were married in the Summer of Love, when it seemed like everyone was either getting married or getting laid a lot. They were married in the campus chapel, with her father officiating, and then it was back to her parents' house for cake and champagne, and then it was flowers, and then it was honeymooning in Mexico, and then the summer was up and they were students again. He was the same boy he'd always been, smoking dope and sweating over his senior thesis, and she was the same girl, underlining in red, re-typing everything he wrote, sleek-haired and oppressively brilliant.”
― Laura Elizabeth Woollett, Beautiful Revolutionary